Whatever It Takes?

The big book right now in liberal education circles is Paul Tough’s Whatever It Takes — and with good reason. The book is touching and delightful; it deftly mixes an intellectual history of the academic debates around poverty with an on the ground look at programs to alleviate it, all in the best magazine feature style. But I found the book disturbing in what it left out: the topics it failed to discuss and the questions it failed to ask. For a book about education, there sure wasn’t much in the way of critical thinking.

The book’s practical hero is Geoffrey Canada, an African-American who graduated from the Harlem ghettos to running local programs to help others do the same. But he quickly became frustrated at the small scale at which he worked, “saving lives” one and two at a time, when thousands of others were all around him. So he decides to adopt a multiblock area of Harlem, which he calls the Harlem Children’s Zone, and do “whatever it takes” to make sure the kids in it get to and graduate from college: parent training, afterschool programs, entirely new schools. And, the story goes, there are fits and starts along the way, but he’s really hit on something big: the schools are a success, the press loves the story, Barack Obama vows to expand the program to a dozen more cities.

And yet. The schools are considered a success because they pass New York State’s standardized tests. And they do that because their principals—under pressure from Canada to raise scores—turn the schools into 24-hour test prep centers. Kids start taking practice tests in the middle of 3rd grade and repeat them every six months so that they’ve near-memorized them by the time they have to take them for real. The school day is lengthened and summer break is skipped so that there’s more time for test prep. There are even test prep sessions on weekends to make sure every kid gets the right grade.

A couple characters—including the middle school principal—object, spouting lines about “teaching the whole child” and insisting it’s a bad idea to replace music and art with more test prep. But they’re given little quarter by the book and Canada eventually fires them because they’re not “getting results” (i.e. high test scores). Most of the remaining teachers leave en masse after that.

It’s weird. When it comes to their own kids, safely enrolled at suburban private schools, liberals don’t seem to have much trouble seeing the problems with high-stakes testing and the importance of music and art, but when it comes to the urban poor such concerns suddenly become expendable, mere niceties that distract from the real business of “tougher standards”. (For those who don’t know the problems with standardized tests, here’s a few: Most of them are norm-referened, designed to ensure half the kids fail. You do better at them by thinking worse — skipping hard parts, guessing answers, skimming instead of understanding. And I have yet to see evidence that raising test scores leads to any good for kids.)

But there’s a more serious problem with the whole theory that underlies the book. The story’s intellectual hero is James Heckman, a conservative University of Chicago economist. Heckman has done a great deal of research on “human capital” — his argument is that investing in early childhood education pays off in the long run by making future workers much more productive, and thus wealthy. To prove this, he cites a number of studies, the most famous of which was on Perry Preschool. In that study, researchers followed a bunch of black kids in Ypsilanti, Michigan and gave half of them free preschool. Tracking them down again at age 27 and age 40, they found the kids who went to preschool stayed in school longer, graduated from high school more, had fewer teen pregnancies and arrests, and made more money. Clearly we should give everyone free preschool!

I have nothing against more free preschool, but this argument is flawed. What makes people stay in school, not get arrested, and make more money isn’t preschool but a good job. A long line of research has shown that when kids have the prospect of a good job in front of them, they tend to buckle down and work harder. Conversely, when jobs disappear, kids turn to drugs and crime and ditching school—after all, why not?

But the Perry Preschool Program didn’t create any new good jobs for those kids. It just redistributed the ones that already existed, giving them to the kids who went to preschool instead of those who didn’t. If everyone in Ypsilanti had gone to preschool, things would be right back where they were before. (More technically, assume that an increase in human capital increases a worker’s productivity. Universal preschool increases the productivity of workers while leaving their supply at the same level. If supply outstrips demand (i.e. there’s unemployment), wages will be unchanged.)

If we truly want every kid to succeed, we need to create jobs for all of them. And that will take fiscal and monetary stimulus, not just better schools.

Dear Aaron: I take your point about the pitfalls of standardized testing (“For those who don’t know the problems with standardized tests, here’s a few: Most of them are norm-referened, designed to ensure half the kids fail. You do better at them by thinking worse — skipping hard parts, guessing answers, skimming instead of understanding. And I have yet to see evidence that raising test scores leads to any good for kids.”) Yet, please consider that the absence of any standardized testing leads to far worse outcomes, as evidenced by the dramatic decline in education systems where, for ideological reasons, there has never been any standard testing program (author Roger Abravanel convincingly makes this point in a recent book, “Meritocrazia”, on Italy’s troubles). It would seem to me that you should be arguing for better tests, rather than no tests at all; and that before even moving to “raising test scores”, which may or may not be good for kids, families ought to at least be informed of test scores at a given school, something quite impossible if there are no standard tests. An imperfect test ought to be at least directionally better than no test. Or do I miss your point?

There’s an assumption behind these kinds of programs that education is ultimately to make the student be of better service to the economy. It’s not necessarily an incorrect assumption, and the general idea is one that people in underprivileged communities often desire — they want to fit into the system better, and education is primarily seen as a path to “success”, not something with any intrinsic worth.

This is in contrast to the intellectually privileged (i.e., the intelligentsia) where there is a resistance to the idea that education is at the service of economics. With this different cultural perspective on education, it doesn’t feel like jobs are the same kind of motivation. I wish underprivileged groups were more open to this perspective… but honestly I don’t think it’s even presented as an option, the intelligentsia is too shy about its privilege to also talk up some of these important core values.

“For those who don’t know the problems with standardized tests, here’s a few: Most of them are norm-referened, designed to ensure half the kids fail. You do better at them by thinking worse — skipping hard parts, guessing answers, skimming instead of understanding. And I have yet to see evidence that raising test scores leads to any good for kids.”

Wha??? Aaron, I have spent my life under the scourge of standardized tests. I have no doubt risen thereby, but I also despise them for the way they inherently embitter me toward the material I once found interesting on its own merits. Nevertheless, “norm-referenced”?! You mean normalized. The norm is allowed to float, just like it is in the highest quality experiments of all kinds. It is one of the great insights of science to know that if you find a bell curve, or any other well-understood distribution, you’re probably on the right track toward some meaningful results.

Also, I would have to disagree, again, after having taken many standardized tests: that the test-taker who has integrated and synthesized knowledge in advance is going to do better, and the person who practices tests in advance has no choice but to synthesize and integrate the information. In a very real way, I have to say the question banks have provided some of the highest quality educational experience I have had, outside of actual one-on-one conversations with professors or other students, which are relatively few and far between. And that, I believe, is because they have the same effect on the brain: you are posed a question, and if you get it right, yay, and if not, you get some explanation. And the mere reading of the explanation, to satisfy your own desire to understand why you got it wrong, drives the synthetic and integrative processes in the mind.

Frankly, it sounds like you have enjoyed more of that rich suburbanite education than anyone. You should try being poorer and disadvantaged relative to your peers.